finding mac address of my stolen lap

[jayakumar001]

My lap was stolen by someone. I lodged a police complaint. They asking for Mac address and IP address to trace it. I don't have it. I had connected my laptop to my router. Is it possible to get Mac address and IP address from router? Please explain it step by step.

 

[mcnumpty23]

some routers store the list of devices that were connected

you need to look in the router config page

 

[Guest]

Supplying an IP address is completely ridiculous- what do they want, the LAN address of your laptop or the most recent ISP supplied WAN address? How will either of these help in locating a stolen item.

MAC address is more understandable, but unlikely that you'll get this from your router unless you had setup reserved DHCP leases.

 

[bill001g]

Mac address is no more useful than a serial number if you had that, it only would be used after the device was recovered to prove it was yours.

The mac address pretty much never leaves the location the device is at so unless you can touch it to see the mac address it does not help a lot. Even then there are 2 mac addresses. The one that is set in the hardware and the one the software actually tells other devices. Since you can set the software to tell anything you want on many devices even if it did leave a location it is not useful for tracking. IP addresses mean nothing since that more represents the internet connection someone purchased than what device is connected to it.

Pretty much there is no way to track a stolen computer...unless it has preinstalled software designed to help in its recovery.